The Wolfowitz Appointment:
A Red Flag for the Coming Wars by Mike Whitney
www.dissidentvoice.org
March 21, 2005

The
nomination of Paul Wolfowitz to the World Bank has brought on the widespread
gnashing of teeth among America’s liberals, but there’s no real reason for
despair. The World Bank has never operated according to its mandate (to
reduce poverty in the developing countries through financial assistance), so
it’s better to have someone like Wolfowitz at the top-spot where the
activities of the bank draw greater public scrutiny. His appointment will
serve the same purpose as a warning label on medicine vial; cautioning needy
third world states that overuse could be hazardous.

The World Bank has
operated below the radar for too long. Rather than reducing poverty, its
strategies of readjusting economies to meet the needs of global
industrialists have only created greater disparities between rich and poor
and a 20- year cycle of economic stagnation. Wolfowitz’s appointment will
show the public how political decision-making has contributed to this
malaise, and demonstrate how the bank functions as an extension of the US
Treasury, working tirelessly on behalf of US financial institutions and big
business. For those who think the Bank should be done away with entirely,
Wolfowitz provides an identifiable “name brand” that will connect the bank
to the egregious policies that keep most of the developing world in
perpetual debtor peonage.

Wolfowitz’s Dismal Record on Human Rights

Wolfowitz’s resume is
bound to draw brickbats from anti-war Europeans. He brings with him the
baggage of two unprovoked wars, 100,000 dead and a constellation of gulags
strung out across the globe; not the type of qualifications we normally
expect for leadership in the World Bank. So far, his nomination has been
greeted with either exasperation or derision, and many believe that his
personal history should preclude him from the top position. The ACLU has
condemned the nomination citing recently discovered FBI documents that
confirm that Wolfowitz “specifically authorized torture techniques” for
interrogations at Guantanamo. Such allegations would normally be career
ending if not grounds for criminal proceedings. However, in the new Bush
paradigm these actions simply indicate a readiness to move up the political
food chain.

What Qualifications?

By any standard,
Wolfowitz is unqualified for his new task. He has no experience in finance
or administration. As for his skills at managing large reconstruction
projects, his history in Iraq speaks for itself. A full year after the
initial invasion less than 2% of the $18 billion provided by Congress for
reconstruction had been spent, even though electrical power, sewage
treatment and clean water were nearly non-existent. In fact, Wolfowitz’s
performance would suggest that the administration never had any intention of
rebuilding Iraq (“We don’t do nation building”). Whatever money couldn’t be
sluiced off to Bush’s constituents (Halliburton, Bechtel etc) simply ended
up disappearing in what may be the greatest corruption scandal of all time.
(To date, an independent UN commission has acknowledged that over $8.8
billion has gone missing from Iraqi oil receipts.) We should also take
notice of Wolfowitz unorthodox manner of awarding contracts. After the fall
of Baghdad it was Wolfowitz who said that contracts would not be issued to
any country that hadn’t participated in the illegal invasion. Saving money
for the American taxpayer was never a serious concern for the Deputy
Secretary. Contracts were issued strictly according to a feudal system
deigned by Wolfowitz to reward those who were loyal to the administration.
(Reconstruction in Afghanistan has been equally abysmal, where only 1 in 5
Afghanis has access to clean water and yet, two-thirds of reconstruction
money goes towards Karzai’s security apparatus.)

Despite the spurious
claims that Wolfowitz’s experience with Tsunami victims “changed his
outlook,” he will continue the same debilitating programs that are the
mainstay of World Bank activity. All the talk about poverty reduction is
pure nonsense. His task will be to entice corrupt foreign leaders to plunge
their countries further into unsustainable debt so the World Bank (and its
sister organization, the IMF) can offer “bail-out” loans and apply harsh
austerity measures designed to pry open markets, destroy the public sector
and deliver valuable natural resources to US corporations. (These usurious
policies have frequently been compared to legalized loan-sharking.) The bank
has always operated this way. Moreover, this is the process that ensures
America’s continued economic hammerlock on developing nations. The policies
are devised to perpetuate poverty not reduce it.

In his new role
Wolfowitz will oversee construction and development loans to Iraq’s
fledgling government. The new Iraqi leadership will be expected to
rubberstamp the many enormous loans that pay for the services of American
mega-corporations and security services. This way, Iraq will stay in a
permanent state “colonial dependency” (Noam Chomsky) even while its vast
natural wealth is spirited out of the country.

The Israel Connection

Wolfowitz’s
appointment comes at an opportune time for Israel. Now that Arafat is out of
the picture, the World Bank is expected “to supervise the implementation of
hundreds of millions of dollars worth of projects in Gaza.” (Jerusalem
Post) Newly elected Mahmoud Abbas will be able pay off the corrupt
Palestinian Authority with funds from the World Bank to do the job that
Arafat always rejected: disarming the militias and cracking down on their
own people.

As one senior official
said, “Wolfowitz is a no-nonsense administrator who knows what needs to be
done in terms of reform and democratization.”

“Democratization?”

Hardly. When we look
at the affect of Wolfowitz’s policies in Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti, it’s
difficult to believe that his influence will produce better results in the
world’s last sanctuary for apartheid. Realists would expect that Wolfowitz’s
involvement will only exacerbate already-existent divisions by expressing an
institutional bias in favor of Israel. It is impossible to imagine that
Wolfowitz could be evenhanded about an issue for which he has expressed
virulent partiality his entire adult life.

Preparing for War

The inserting of Paul
Wolfowitz at the World Bank is actually part of a global war strategy. The
idea is to put Bush loyalists and ideologues wherever they can advance the
neocon agenda and undermine international organizations. The Pentagon’s new
“National Defense Strategy” released this week makes this perfectly clear.

The document states
that America’s strength will continue to be challenged by “a strategy of the
weak.”

Asked to explain the
paper Douglas Feith (no. 3 at the Pentagon) said, “There are various actors
around the world that are looking to either attack or constrain the US, and
they are going to find creative ways of doing that, that are not the obvious
conventional military attacks. We need to think broadly about diplomatic
lines of attack, legal lines of attack, technological lines of attack, all
kinds of asymmetrical warfare that various actors can use to try to
constrain our behavior.”

Feith is not talking
about the nebulous threat of terrorism. He’s talking about the nations of
the world that are looking for ways to deter future American aggression
(“diplomatic, legal, and technological”). This is an administration that
sees the entire world as a potential enemy. The amount of paranoia in this
statement epitomizes the bunker mentality that pervades the current White
House. Enemies are everywhere, trying to constrain the US with
“international forums, judicial processes and terrorism.”

“Judicial Processes?”

The administration
holds itself above the law, and those who would make it conform to the law
(Guantanamo, Iraq etc) are the de facto enemies of the state. The Wolfowitz
appointment is a part of the “asymmetrical warfare” to which Feith alludes.
The administration plans to extend its grip by filling every available
position of authority with Bush loyalists, undermining the efforts of the
international community to resolve crises through multilateral means. It’s
all a straightforward attack on the current world order and, tragically, a
prelude to even bigger and more catastrophic confrontations.